Anthropic Will Pay $1.5B to Writers, Publishers Affected by Piracy

At what point does training an AI on previously published works cross the line into piracy? A number of high-profile lawsuits are seeking to answer this very question. As Alex Reisner wrote in The Atlantic earlier this year, these lawsuits raise the question of whether or not “AI companies had trained large language models using authors’ work without consent or compensation.” This week, one of those cases, Bartz v Anthropic, concluded in a $1.5 billion settlement.

In a settlement described by Cade Metz of The New York Times as “the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright cases,” AI company Anthropic agreed to pay this sum, which will involve the authors of 500,000 books each receiving $3,000. At issue in the case, Metz reports, wasn’t necessarily the act of using these books for training purposes, which could be considered fair use. Instead, U.S. District Court judge William Alsup took issue with Anthropic using books that it knew had been pirated.

What does this actually mean for writers whose work was pirated? The Authors Guild, an advocacy group for writers, published a comprehensive analysis of the settlement. (Full disclosure: I am an Authors Guild member.) It notes that, while seven million books were included in the databases of pirated books used by Anthropic, only around 500,000 were used as part of the training.

In order to be eligible for payment from the settlement fund, books must have been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, the timing of which also plays a part in terms of determining eligibility. The next milestone in the case will come on Oct. 10, when the plaintiffs in the case will submit a final list of the works affected, which the settlement administrator in the case will convert into a searchable database.

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This is only one of several cases involving AI companies using pirated books for training purposes. Beyond the specifics of how this settlement plays out, there’s also a larger question of how this settlement might affect other cases. Several experts cited in the Times‘ coverage of the Anthropic settlement, for instance, predict that this will lead to larger changes within the industry. Will that involve some other high-profile settlements? Writers and publishers alike are waiting with bated breath.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…